Re: Commercialization of Ada Technology - Part 3

[wes@obie.UUCP (Barnacle Wes)]

In article <728@actnyc.UUCP>, djs@actnyc.UUCP (Dave Seward) writes:
> In article <330@ajpo.sei.cmu.edu> eberard@ajpo.sei.cmu.edu (Edward Berard) writes:
> >One of the larger obstacles to the acceptance of Ada technology
> >(anywhere) is that it only solves a limited number of problems,
> >specifically military problems.
> >
> I have heard this before, and not understood it then either. What about Ada
> makes it inappropriate for, for example, compilers, assemblers, linkers, other
> text processing applications (such as those I use it for). What makes it
> inappropriate for a national banking network, such as was done in Finland in
> Ada.
  [much deleted]
>                                             As Ada is not well suited
> to use without the underlying model of Software Engineering, it will
> not play in Peoria until the underlying model is accepted. This, in my
> opinion, is what the big deal is.

There isn't really anything about Ada that makes it inappropriate for
writing compilers, assemblers, linkers, etc.; it has been used for
this.  The NYU Ada compiler, and Ada system compiled itself I believe.
The real kicker about Ada is that is was *not* designed to be a
general-purpose language!

There is a common misconception that the DoD looks on Ada as a
programming language for all purposes; they do not.  Ada was created
as a language that would be suitable for developing imbedded command,
control, and communications (C^3) systems.

C^3 systems share some features with banking systems (distributed
processing, and in some systems, the concept of an "atomic"
transaction, the transaction is not completed unless the ENTIRE
transaction can be completed.

C^3 systems also share many "text-processing" features with compilers,
linkers, etc.  Indeed, a targeting program for an ICBM is basically a
"target set compiler" is it not?

But Ada was still CREATED with the idea of using it to develope
imbedded C^3 systems.  This really shows in some areas, like the
limited I/O system - most imbedded systems talk to really STRANGE I/O
devices via specially-built interfaces, not to terminals and VMS disk
systems.

With a run-time library that interfaces to the host system well, Ada
can be used to do anything.  It's rather like a more powerful version
of pascal, or perhaps a verbose C with strong typing (strong typing is
for weak minds!).  I'm not convinced writing an accounting system in
Ada is a good idea, but I wouldn't necessarily want to do it in C
either :-).

	Wes Peters

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